Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
BLACK PRIVILEGE VS. IMMIGRANT PRIVILEGE
It is not about where you start - It's about what you do next! -- YNOT!
Sometimes I joke that I should write a book called Black Privilege, because no matter how hard I tried, there were always Black people, women, immigrants, and plenty of others who were smarter than me, more talented than me, worked harder than me, or simply beat me.
And that raises a question I think America needs to talk about more honestly:
How much of our future is determined by where we start — and how much is determined by what we do after the starting gun fires?
Those are not the same question.
Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly returned to the words of the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal.”
King emphasized that it did not say some men or white men. It said all men. But King also argued that America had repeatedly failed to live up to that principle through slavery, segregation and discrimination. And of course that includes women.
That distinction matters. Equal human worth does not mean everyone begins life with equal circumstances.
Some people are born wealthy. Some are born poor.
Some have great parents. Some have terrible parents.
Some attend excellent schools. Some attend failing schools.
Some are healthy. Some are disabled.
Some are born in peaceful countries.
Others are born into war, corruption or crushing poverty.
Life has never dealt everybody the same cards.
But the cards you are dealt are not necessarily the hand you finish with.
Look at Barack and Michelle Obama.
Barack Obama graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School and became the first African American president of the United States.
Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School before building her own professional career.
Their success doesn’t prove that discrimination never existed.
It proves something different: Your race or sex does not establish the ceiling on what you can become.
And that brings me to something I have watched throughout my life:
IMMIGRANT PRIVILEGE
I use that phrase deliberately. Not because immigrants are handed an easier life.
Often it is exactly the opposite. The immigrant may arrive without money. Without connections. Sometimes without English.
Sometimes without much formal education. He looks around and realizes something extraordinary:
Nobody promised me success — but I have been given the opportunity to pursue it.
So he works. One job becomes two. Two jobs finance a small business. The small business buys a house. The house eventually helps buy a rental property.
Twenty or thirty years later, the person who arrived with almost nothing may have accumulated a business, a home, investments and property.
That story isn’t universal, and immigrants themselves vary enormously in education, income and outcomes. In 2023, for example, immigrants overall were just as likely as U.S.-born adults to hold at least a bachelor’s degree — 36% for each group — although educational attainment varies dramatically depending on country and region of origin.
But there is something worth studying in the immigrant mentality:
When you believe opportunity exists, you tend to look for opportunity.
When you believe everything is stacked permanently against you, you may stop looking.
That is where I become skeptical of the way we sometimes talk about privilege.
There are unquestionably advantages and disadvantages in life. The numbers make that impossible to deny. Federal Reserve data, for example, still show substantial racial differences in household wealth.
But acknowledging unequal starting points is very different from telling people that their starting point determines their destination.
It doesn’t. That distinction is enormously important.
The message should never be: “The system guarantees you will succeed.”
It doesn’t.
Nor should the message be: “The system guarantees you will fail.”
It doesn’t do that either.
America’s most extraordinary characteristic has never been that everyone starts equally.
They plainly do not. It is that people can move. Up. Down. Sideways. They can fail.
